Vitamix Cauliflower How To guide

Wife made me cook so I thought it would be fun to make a video on using the Vitamix to make fried Cauliflower Tater Tots. Yes, I was a skeptic too, but once the rich, creamy fried goodness entered my mouth (Sprinkled with salt of course), I have been converted. Do not get me wrong, nothing can replace the yummy original tater tots, but I never really liked cauliflower to begin with, so this was a good opportunity to try something new!

The video was done with a slider, a 35mm lens, and a tripod, but I found hand held gave me more versatility. It was just a pain to mitigate shake. It was also good practice for me because I think for close up subjects, I’m getting a little better at pulling focus. It also took about 5hrs to go from trimming, editing, and the final product, which is waay too long. (Most of the time was finding a suitable creative commons video track), but if I am to make this a viable hobby that tries to make a little cash here and there, I need to be more efficient at it.

New Found appreciation for Videographers

It’s been a long while since I posted here. Figured I now have something worthy to post.

Behind the scene footage of a photoshoot I did today. warning slightly NSFW.

This took an obscene amount of time to post process. I’ve decided the two most overlooked, complicated, and under-appreciated tasks when making any short movie (or real film for that matter) are: color grading, and text/credits. They took a long while to do and to sync up. Don’t even get me started on syncing up the music! All in all, it was a great learning experience. Next time, I will try to avoid hand held if at all possible. It just ruins a lot of shots for me being so shaky. As for color grading, depending on the lighting and scene, it was hard to get everything uniform. Which makes it difficult so I had to adjust exposure during post process. Now I know why there are giant budgets to shield against light during shoots. As far as the camera is concerned, I’m allowed to only shoot at 1/30 of a second for a 30fps video. At 60FPS, I can go 1/60. If anyone one is familiar with photography, you’ll know during the daylight, that’s pretty much instant overexposure, so I shoot with a lot of ND filters (sunglasses for my lenses) to make things darker.

That limits my post processing options. I don’t have the skills to do all that movie magic and edit/composite things, so all I have during post are color grading and cropping. Which makes it essentially to nail real exposure and focus during the shoot. Since everything is so compressed, you don’t have much latitude in terms of exposure. Don’t even get me started on focusing. I still have a hard time determining which direction to move the focus when the subject is near or far. Though I’d reckon over time it will become second nature. But that’s why I like it. It’s new, and I find it a bit more challenging than photography.

Another thing I need to improve is during sliding sequences, I need to go much slower if possible. And this is the easy stuff! There was no actual speaking/audio parts in this behind the scenes short! i can only imagine how painful that is to sync up. But I’m glad I went out and did it. Got to meet talented local people around my area who love what they do, and do it for the joy of it.

I have a few future video projects I have in mind. But all in all, I’m still a complete beginner at this. Making things up as I go along basically. There was no planning to any of these shots. It was all rather spontaneous, and I just looked through all the footage to see what was usable, and slowly chiseled it down to it’s current form. Even that took a ridiculous amount of time, and after the first cut I made one more edit to tighten it up and clean it some. I think it was a good attempt, since it’s been so long since I’ve done any video work.

So far, I think I should stick to what I do best, which is photography! But I shall not be deterred, video is merely an extension of photography.